Movies

Gus Van Sant tapped to adapt 'Death Note'

The director behind Milk has been tapped by Warner Bros to helm an adaptation of the Japanese manga series, the Tracking Board reports.

If the news is true, Gus Van Sant will be replacing Shane Black, who was previously attached to bring Death Note to the big screen.

The Death Note series follows Light Yagami, a brilliant high school student who finds a strange notebook that has been misplaced by a god of death. He soon discovers the notebook’s supernatural powers, which allow its owner to kill anyone whose name and face he knows simply by writing their name in its pages.

The young protagonist, who takes on the alias of Kira (from the Japanese pronunciation of “killer”), intends to use his new weapon to create a utopia by ridding the world of evil. But the strange deaths start to attract attention from the police and from a young detective known as L, who is at least as brilliant as Light. The two geniuses embark on a long struggle with all the trappings of the most sophisticated chess matches.

The Japanese manga series has sold over 15 million copies worldwide and has already been adapted into an anime TV series, a video game and a few Japanese-language live action movies. — AFP Relaxnews